A Time to Hush

At one point today I walked into my boss's office and found him monitoring the L.A. City Council meeting on radio. Someone or another mentioned the Holocaust - why, I don't know, but there it is.

Now, today is Adolf Hitler's 128th birthday, interestingly enough. If we had been so unfortunate as to witness a full lifespan for him, he'd be dead by now anyway, despite the predictions of various B-movies.


Yecch.

Far be it from me to suggest that we shouldn't discuss the Holocaust, if for no other reason than to prevent certain despicable liars from getting away with their evil. It happened, folks, and all the wishing in the world by those it hurts or those who want to avoid responsibility won't make it go away.


On the other hand, I cringe every time I hear a politician mention the Holocaust. In fact I'm getting a little tired of hearing about it at all. There's an unfortunate tendency on the part of so many people to use the Holocaust to produce some result, and that strikes me as vulgar if not downright blasphemous. I gather that Wittgenstein said "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
If it weren't for the fact that some won't face facts, I'd suggest that very remedy, and the sooner the better.

Benshlomo says, You can't say anything sensible about some things, folks, so shut up already.

Un-Tragic Un-Hero

It's not for me to go over the details of the bloodbath at Virginia Tech, nor to draw a lot of deep meaningful conclusions. I wasn't there, and the analysis has all been done quite well elsewhere anyway. Certainly in this day and age, when the Virginia Tech coverage has yet to match the frenzy that greeted Anna Nicole Smith's death, there's no need for me to get into it in any factual way.

This post responds to a comment I heard on television while I was browsing the magazines in a local convenience store this afternoon. Someone referred to the events at Virginia Tech as a "tragedy".

Here's how the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines "tragedy":

A drama or literary work in which the main character is brought to ruin or suffers extreme sorrow, especially as a consequence of a tragic flaw, moral weakness, or inability to cope with unfavorable circumstances.

Implicit in that definition is the notion that the tragic hero has one tragic flaw in an otherwise upright and admirable character. A famous example concerns Oedipus the King, ruler of Thebes, a man of great gifts, enormous courage and wisdom, and overweening pride in himself. Not only does he have a flaw, it's that very flaw that brings him to ruin; because he's proud, he ignores the warnings of the gods, and thus loses his family, his home, his country and his eyesight.

Notice the point. In tragedy, an admirable person not only suffers from one particular bad characteristic, but suffers a downfall through the operation of that very characteristic. If someone comes to grief through no fault of his/her own, it can be sad, but not tragic.

Few people today bother about such niceties, but this guy Cho was a student of literature in some sense, and probably knew something about tragedy's literal meaning. Furthermore, given his video suicide note, it's pretty clear he wanted to think of himself in a grand way.

That's why this post. I'm a literature major myself, and a teacher, and I say words have power; I won't watch them being devalued, especially at a time like this. I'd like to make it clear that Cho was not a tragic hero, and calling his actions a tragedy pushes them to a level they can't sustain. It's not fair to those who struggle against destiny without shooting anyone, and it's not fair to the innocent people he shot.

Did Cho have virtues? I assume so - at the very least he could write plays that reached his classmates, even if it was only to creep them out. Other than that, he seems to have been antisocial in the extreme, completely incapable of relating to others or even acknowledging their reality. He lacked self-knowledge and the willingness to address his problems in any meaningful way. He took no responsibility for himself; his last statement was one of accusation against everyone he was about to murder, blaming them for their own deaths. (Full disclosure: I was a similar wet blanket during my first year of college, which may be why this gets me so steamed. The first year of college is tough for a lot of people, most of whom don't murder several humans in response.)

In short, he was not an admirable person with a tragic flaw, he was a pitiful clown with a couple of guns. The dreadful irony of this incident is that so many people (good people or otherwise) died at the hands of such a profoundly small man. He wasn't even an anti-hero; he was a loser.

Little Miss has compassion for Cho, as well as his victims. For the past few days she's been wondering what on earth he could have gone through to drive him to such a state. She's a better person than I am, folks.

Benshlomo says, In tragedy there is nobility - in mass murder there is none.

So It Goes

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. died last night.


In accordance with good Jewish custom, we will now take advantage of the event of his demise to reflect upon his life and work (because, the rabbis tell us, you can't really know the meaning of a person's life until it's over).

On the other hand, Mr. Vonnegut's biographical details are sufficiently well-know that we need not dwell upon them too much. So briefly:

The man's reputation rests primarily on a series of books he produced in the late 50s and the 60s, particularly The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1961), Cat's Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). They dealt with death, humor, absurdity and madness, and as the Salon Reader's Guide pointed out, it's one of God's mysterious gifts that the man most able in our generation to communicate with us in the spirit of such times was a Nazi prisoner of war and present at the bombing of Dresden.

The five titles mentioned above make a kind of matched set - certain characters appear in more than one of them, their themes and styles are similar, and so on.


I, personally, have read those classic five novels plus Breakfast of Champions (1973) and Slapstick (1976). I enjoyed them both, as well as his classic short stories "Harrison Bergeron," "Welcome to the Monkey House," and so on, but I'm in no position to comment on the critical consensus that his work after 1969 doesn't match his previous standard.

What does strike me, looking back on Vonnegut's career, is that his courage was unassailable. In particular, he was one of the few non-Jewish artists (Roberto Benigni is another) who ever tried to grapple with the Holocaust, which is all the more remarkable when you consider that his ancestry was German.

He was not so foolish as to set any of his fictions in a concentration camp; instead he used his war experiences to examine the totalitarian mindset, particularly in Mother Night and Slaughterhouse-Five. It was in the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five, by the way, that he laid claim to the kind of brutally honest realism that we always, always need. "If I had been born in Germany," he mused, "I suppose I would have been a Nazi."

That's a scary thought, but it's a whole lot more useful than any dozen speeches by self-righteous moralists decrying somebody else's sins, because somebody like Vonnegut in his admission of human weakness gives us all permission to be frank about ourselves, too. We might kneel before the aforesaid self-righteous moralist and loudly proclaim "Yes, I'm a sinner!", but what difference will that make in our lives when we leave the house of confession? We read Vonnegut, on the other hand, and was can quietly say to ourselves "Yeah, me too. Now what am I going to do about it?"

Speaking of Vonnegut's courage, by the way - it's a smaller thing, but he also managed to publish a short story called "The Big Space Fuck" in Harlan Ellison's Again, Dangerous Visions. Submitting something with that title to Ellison probably wasn't so very dangerous, but it's still pretty impressive. And I can't think of too many other writers who would have the chutzpah to open a novel with "Call me Jonah" - that a direct cop from Moby Dick, in case you didn't know. (Well, actually, I can think of plenty of writers with that kind of chutzpah, but very few who could get away with it.)


In any case, I'd just like to point something out regarding Vonnegut's date of death. In Jewish life, we are now in the middle of a period called Sefira, the weeks between Passover and Shavuot, between the exodus from Egypt and the receiving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai, and we are commanded in Torah to count each of those days. The rabbis teach us that each of those 49 days focuses on a certain combination of seven of God's attributes - lovingkindness, discipline, beauty, victory, glory, eternity and majesty. The first day focuses on the lovingkindness of lovingkindness, the next on the discipline of lovingkindness, and so on.

Well, last night, when Vonnegut died, we focused on the discipline of discipline, and asked ourselves: In life, do we administer discipline to ourselves and our loved ones in a disciplined manner? Do we discipline in a measured fashion, or do we insist on rules for their own sake?

It's satisfying to know that Vonnegut, who confronted fascism so steadily in his writing by confronting it in himself and who clearly disciplined himself and others with some compassion for their humanity, closed out his life on the day dedicated to that very thing.

Benshlomo says, Good night Kurt Vonnegut, and long live Kilgore Trout.